How to Troubleshoot a Projector when Presenting from a Windows Laptop

Introduction:

In this article, I will be covering three primary scenarios when your projector isn't working and what you can do to fix these issues as well as how to approach meeting incidents in the workplace. I'll discuss some alternatives, tips, and what action you can take if you hit a roadblock or start to see a pattern of reports arise.

Projectors are not the easiest to maneuver especially as they age in an environment they are more prone to bugs, but conferencing technologies have advanced rapidly over the past few years to the point where a projector device literally fits in the palm of our hands. However, video conferencing and projector meeting room equipment is not 100% perfect of course as with any technological system in existence new unusual errors can emerge as time goes on.

As a former Help Desk Technician, managing projectors and cloud conferencing systems, I can say from experience can be quite tricky as there are time-sensitive meetings and projects on the line that may need to be rescheduled which eats up even more irreplaceable time. Meeting disruptions often cannot always be avoided, but there are some general troubleshooting steps end-users can take before escalating it and precautionary steps that can be taken to ensure a meeting kicks off right on schedule.

I was once pinged by our CEO in Skype for Business in a past role to urgently help pinpoint the problem with a projector display. I identified that all other Dell laptops could not connect, even my own. Luckily, there was another available room nearby they could transfer the meeting over to. I tried everything I could think, but looked underneath the conferencing table and noticed a loose panel sticking up with some old cabling. I saw that a convertor for the projector to work was routed there, and appeared to be bumped over time or its internal structure was damaged by meeting attendees' feet.

I had to show the convertor part to our fellow team members, and we determined it could be rush ordered through CDW and installed with the assistance of our Maintenance Engineers.

Tip: A universal cable tether or ring is essential especially due to how many adapter types exist out there.

Liberty Universal HDMI Adapter Ring Complete Assembly with 5 AdaptersLiberty Universal HDMI Adapter Ring Complete Assembly with 5 Adapters

Digitalinx-DL-AR-Universal-Complete-Adapters - Amazon

The Fundamentals:

If you're part of an organization, the best step you can do is to help ensure you left the meeting room how it was before the presentation started, meaning the adapters are in the same place, the remote is placed back in its holder or in a visible spot for future presenters. No one should end up scavenging for equipment or making a run to IT for an adapter someone accidentally.

Meeting room organization and regular maintenance is vital for reducing the likelihood of having back-to-back incidents arise.

It is typically a good idea to schedule a testing block time or reserve a conference room you intend to use for the meeting a few minutes or 10-15 minutes ahead of time before the meeting begins if possible to verify the projector and conferencing equipment is operational for the presentation which can help avoid making emergency calls to your IT Support Department during the meeting time.

Try to arrive as early as possible. Otherwise, towards the end of business hours, you could test out a conference room when more may not be as heavily reserved and to ensure it's working with your laptop model or to become familiar with the conferencing equipment before the actual meeting occurs.

Game-changing Tools:

With the help of my colleague and System Administrator, we found out the best way to let everyone know what equipment and connections exist was to modify and add room resource description attribute entries tied to the meeting room to populate in Outlook as well when anyone would pull up and schedule a meeting.

I spent time going through each room to ensure those fields were present for anyone scheduling a meeting to a conference room. If you're curious as an end-user what that looks like, see Paul Cunningham, MVP's Practical 365 Show the Features of Room and Equipment | Overview and Create and manage room mailboxes | Microsoft Documentation to refer to a current document overview of how IT Support Professionals must establish this.

You may want to consider requesting that be a feature be implemented in your current environment or that resource attributes be customized further and maintained if you have a lot of different equipment or setups across your organization for each conference meeting room.

If you work for a large organization or one that is growing extensively, then you may want to consider also a Visual Directory or office space search tool for team members and room layouts as well, which is a good alternative for seeing info on rooms in real-time e.g., check-ins or availability

Visit: OfficeSpace's site: (https://www.officespacesoftware.com/features/visual-directory/) to learn more. The one drawback of this tool was that you really need someone to maintain it and stay on top of all room equipment changes and employee relocation moves or requests. However, this tool was one I used in a past role and saved me time hunting down desk locations or getting lost in a sea of cubes. Conferencing room location identification was performed at lightning speed and it helps keep tabs on where key departments or teams are or were moved to as long as it's uploaded regularly.

Scenario #1: Blank Projected Display Stating "No Signal Found"

1. Check the Cabling & Types: First, ensure that the connection you're using i.e. HDMI, etc. is secured into the adapter if being used or reseat the connection (disconnecting the cable and re-connecting it). It can be easy for cables in meeting or conferencing rooms to get damaged or the connections. Each laptop is quite different when it comes down to the internal components and external overall design specifications, however, ports are quite sensitive to wrong inputs.

Note: Often others may try to plug in the wrong adapter or confuse ports thereupon inflicting damage to the adapters used for presenting in the meeting room which could ruin the ports on ones laptop resulting in hardware damage requiring a station to be either repaired, replaced, or serviced if it's still covered under warranty. Once again, spot-check a laptop for any damage between the cables, adapter, and port you're using. There are times where others have also tried to plug in their power supply connections or got mixed up with another portable adapter left accidentally by a previous meeting guest or attendee.

2. Check the Projector & Remote Settings: It's possible someone switched the projector onto the wrong input or altered it with its remote etc. Try powering off the projector and back on once, then examine the input on the screen ensuring it aligns to what the laptop is leveraging i.e. HDMI.

If you don't have the remote or it's nowhere to be found, then you may need to get to the projector's location i.e. is it on a cart, on the ceiling and if someone can reach the power button on the projector itself then power cycle it that way. Once the signal error clears, then you can test connecting your laptop again.

3. Examine the Laptop: If you're about to start a meeting and you're seeing the projector is on the correct input etc., but your laptop still won't present then try leveraging the
"Windows Key Logo + P" keyboard shortcut, which will present 4 primary options, and a horizontal access panel will emerge on the far-right hand side of your screen.

If you're not connected to any monitors or a docking station, try the shortcut right now if you'd to see what it looks like on your screen as you don't need to be connected to anything to see the options of:
PC Screen Only,
Duplicate
Extend
Second Screen Only
Connect to wireless display at the bottom is shown

PROJECT window pop-up

Note: The option you should try FIRST is Duplicate which is technically equivalent to mirroring. What you use on your laptop when you often connect to one or more monitors via a docking station also is typically the Extend option. When the window appears on the right-hand side of your laptop, click on the option directly once the window emerges or use the UP or DOWN arrow keys to navigate each one.

Sometimes your laptop can get stuck on zoomed or enlarged display settings you've modified away from defaults or a particular option type, so you may need to select another and then go back to the intended or correct one. If your laptop is still stuck on a particular display mode or everything looks skewered, then try just restarting once, signing back in, and testing again. You may also use the shortcut above again and try to change your display back to PC only if you're no longer connect to a projector, external monitors, screens, etc.

4. Scan for Physical Damage: Examine the VGA, HDMI adapters used, even the laptop's connection areas for the adapters as sometimes team members have damaged them by plugging incorrect cords into them at their desk or jamming them into the point of bending or injuring the laptop's sides. Sometimes water or liquid damage unknown to you may have impacted the end-user's laptop as well. One time we had placed a service request into Dell and we found a bunch of water damage hidden when we opened up the laptop and the end-user had failed to communicate what had occurred and when which resulted in us having to help transition them off that water damaged station as we no longer had that model as a standard for their department. It was truly a case where "looks can be deceiving." The hidden water damage was causing docking station issues, connectivity, and performance problems, therefore by looking at the laptop externally it was not obvious nor anyone was aware of helping them prior with liquid damage. Internally the system had drowned at one point and we suspected the water damage was behind all of their issues overall.

Scenario #2: Being Stumped & Figuring Out Next Steps

1. Leverage Your Own Team: Have a team member in the meeting test connecting their laptop as that will isolate whether it's an issue pertaining to your OS or hardware fault.

Once a team member's laptop connects then you will need to ensure you have all OS updates and manufacturer updates completed for your laptop model. As an end-user, you may not have the ability to do this, but an IT Support Department team member can assist to ensure you're not behind on graphics drivers, the BIOS (firmware) tied to your laptop's communication input, and output functions, etc.

Note: A few years back, I ensured a Dell laptop had all of its OS updates and manufacturer updates. The BIOS update did the trick, but please be careful if the station has a BitLocker Encryption key, then you may need to temporarily disable it as a precaution then re-enable it once it is completed. Once the BIOS was updated they were able to present again as all conference rooms failed. It is not ideal to update the BIOS immediately and should be considered as a very last resort also as it can lead to blue screens, boot failures, or impact the station to a point where it could be in an unusable state. Closely follow the manufacturer's BIOS instructions as well available on their site.

2. Other Conferencing Rooms & Backup Secondary Meeting Locations: Compare whether presentation connection failures or the same behavior shows across multiple conference rooms with the same projector or a similar conferencing room setup within your organization. Another conference room with a different projector model or the same one if present elsewhere may not produce the same issue encountered.

3. Consider Other Video & Meeting Options: A projector is not the only way to meet or share presentations with co-workers etc. Often organizations have more than one option available i.e. Zoom, Slack, screencast or it may be time to consider alternative conferencing and newer cloud systems in existence or gradually upgrading the existing projectors in your organization if a particular model is causing an uptick of issues or reports overall.

4. Manufacturer Support & Various Scenarios: You should be able to contact the manufacturer of the projector for support via their website if no one is able to use the projector in the conference room, then the IT Support Department needs to be involved ASAP. After eliminating your laptop and others, it's certainly possible that the projector is the root cause and sometimes you may have other errors besides "No Signal" that need extensive troubleshooting or point to a tricky hardware fault.

Scenario #3: The End-User Does Not Know How to Operate the Conference Room Equipment & Is Unfamiliar with Presenting in the Environment

1. Missed Training: A lot of end-users found the UI confusing for a one-on-one meeting and personal meeting rooms in regards to Lifesize, however, it is essential to establish eLearning and training materials on any conferencing systems in place or new ones recently implemented.

Consider ensuring your fellow team members have completed mandatory training or sit on any upcoming ones or are re-assigned it in your organization's Learning Management System (LMS) via a request to ensure they can navigate important meetings when supporting customers, trying to demo products, etc. as a poor meeting experience can be quite costly as well. At times it may be necessary to schedule a 1:1 meeting to help an end-user prepare for a new hire meeting, or one with a lot of attendees vital to the company so it is beneficial to block out time to go over presenting or testing their workstation.

At TechBar we had provided quick demos of Lifesize and sometimes it is difficult to have key notes up while in a meeting or presentation, but as my team members often advised you can have your notes printed out as well or some video conferencing software platforms have note-taking integrations e.g. Zoom or Hive Notes.

With Microsoft Powerpoint there is a "presenter or speaker notes view" that is quite helpful as well. In another workplace, I had created a foundational guide on the wall covering guest access and quick tips to minimize calls or emergency Help Desk chats also, so it can help to have instructions always available in the room over basic connection steps not just for projectors and conferencing equipment, but Wi-Fi guest access as well.

2. Unawareness of Options & Alternatives: Most organizations have alternative or backup meeting options in the event one communication method goes down. For example, Zoom or Lifesize could have an outage, however, a workplace may have Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or Slack for calls. A wide array of conferencing apps, so an organization must never rely upon one solely or have a dedicated Plan B everyone in the company should be made aware of.

Scenario #4: Presentation Failure Patterns & A Series of Reports:

1. Comb through Ticket History & Discuss with Meeting Organizers: Due to the uptick in projector incidents finding a replacement projector model to standardize was gradually overseen by me as a mini-project with our Maintenance Department for our most popular or known issue rooms as not just the cabling had worn down, but the overall display quality and performance of our long-time projectors were diminishing with time.

2. Invest: While you may be on a tight budget for the year, insufficient or outdated and damaged equipment duck-taped or exhibiting degraded performance for meetings can be costly. It takes a significant amount of time to organize meetings and a poor experience can reflect badly especially if customers are involved or a large number of attendees.

Constant failures projector\presenter-wise can insinuate frustration or give the impression a company is disorganized or lacks sufficient resources to effectively communicate essential information. Having a good reputation over meeting launches without technical incidents is absolutely crucial and the IT Department is an integral part of this, but ongoing training\sharing knowledge over how to leverage the software and equipment in place for presenting also comes into play over time as well.

Conclusion:

Projectors can be susceptible to dust collection. Often within the manual of the projector or online via video tutorials available you may find instructions for the model of how to clean lenses, address certain common messages or error codes that are often heavily documented already on potential steps to try to extinguish them,

Additionally, it is possible an update impacts multiple Windows OS workstations inflicting connectivity to external screens, monitors, and projectors. If more than one team member or pattern is being seen across the user population with more than one projector not connecting or even their monitors at their desk then it could be an issue that needs to be escalated by contacting Microsoft, a System Admin to help roll back the updates, or even the manufacturer if the updates implemented on stations or updates fail to resolve it for a particular laptop model.

Lifesize Meeting Equipment:

https://legacy.lifesize.com

In a past role, I recall a project for our interns was to divide and conquer spot-checking all of the Lifesize Cloud video conferencing systems for missed updates and to perform a series of maintenance checks towards the end of the day to help minimize incidents that year. While we had a dedicated video conferencing and meeting conferencing guru on our team, it was essential that he took time to train fellow team members on how to resolve common meeting incidents and maintenance over our devices.

At times we had massive outages or service disruptions as well, which we often verified through their support team. While Lifesize is easy to use, I prefer for a one-on-one to leverage Zoom.

The "Windows Key + P" shortcut mentioned earlier in this article is actually a lifesaver not just for projector issues, but display issues and external monitor connection errors as well when docked at your desk e.g., when one monitor works or your laptop display is not extending and all cables are secure to the monitors.

Lastly, if you're ever using a personal workstation for presenting, then you may have a System Restore point available to revert any updates but it is not ideal if you've made a lot of changes to your system see (Microsoft Support KB - System Recovery & Restore Options ).

If this article helped you resolve projector meeting connection issues or found it useful, remember to select the "Thumbs Up" button below, or feel free to comment if you think this article was useful or have feedback. Thanks again!